Craft is becoming a Laravel app — a Drupal dev watches a CMS change engines mid-flight
Here's a sentence I didn't expect to write in 2026: Craft CMS is being rebuilt on Laravel. Craft 6, in alpha since May, is a ground-up port from the Yii framework it has run on for its entire life onto Laravel — and it reframes Craft as something you can drop into an existing Laravel app. As a Drupal developer, I've seen this movie before. Drupal did its own "get off the island" onto Symfony in Drupal 8. That gives me a specific, slightly haunted perspective on what Craft is about to go through.
What's actually happening
The facts, because the hype needs anchoring:
- Craft 5 (currently ~5.11, on Yii 2, PHP 8.2+) is the stable line everyone runs in production. Craft 6 is alpha — 6.0.0-alpha.1 landed 6 May 2026, with alphas since (alpha.18 on 1 September). Beta is targeted for Q3 2026, stable for Q4.
- Craft 6 targets Laravel 13 and PHP 8.5, up from Yii 2 / PHP 8.2.
- The control panel is being rebuilt as a Vue/Inertia app.
- The pitch is that you can add Craft to an existing Laravel application and use "the full breadth of the Laravel ecosystem" alongside it. Pixel & Tonic promise a Craft 5→6 upgrade "on your own timeline."
That last promise is the one I want to talk about, because I've heard its Drupal cousin.
What Drupal 8 taught me
When Drupal moved onto Symfony components, the strategic argument was unarguable and, long-term, correct: stop maintaining a bespoke framework, adopt the shared PHP ecosystem, hire from a bigger pool. All true. But the transition detonated the contrib ecosystem. The core team could re-platform core on its own schedule; the thousands of modules a real site depends on could not. For years the honest answer to "should we upgrade?" was "which of your modules has a stable D8 release yet?" — and a meaningful chunk of the community and its modules simply never made the jump. The framework swap was invisible to end clients and brutal for the plugin authors holding it all up.
Re-platforming a CMS onto a general-purpose framework is the right long-term bet and a short-term ecosystem earthquake. The core team upgrades on its schedule. Every plugin has its own schedule. The migration is judged, years later, by how many of those schedules line up.
The questions I'd actually ask about Craft 6
So I'm not worried about Laravel's merits — Laravel is excellent, and Craft-on-Laravel will probably be lovely to build on. The questions that decide whether this goes well aren't about the framework; they're about the ecosystem, and Drupal already ran the experiment:
- What happens to the Craft plugin ecosystem when the framework, the service layer, and the control-panel frontend (now Vue/Inertia) all change at once? That's three moving foundations under every plugin simultaneously.
- "Upgrade on your own timeline" is reassuring, but your timeline is really the slowest of your dependencies' timelines. Every plugin author has their own appetite for a rewrite, and the ones who've moved on won't do it at all.
- Craft's plugin market is smaller and more commercial than Drupal's — which could cut both ways: fewer plugins to port, but each paid plugin is a business decision, not a volunteer's weekend.
The honest take
The contrarian-but-fair reading: the move is probably right, mostly invisible to clients, and its true cost lands squarely on plugin authors — exactly as Drupal 8's did. It'll be judged in 2028, not now, by how much of the ecosystem made the jump. And the boring, load-bearing caveat that the excitement tends to skip: this is alpha software. Nobody should be planning a production Craft 6 build today. Watch it, prototype on it, and — if you're a plugin author — start thinking about your port now, because if Drupal taught me anything, it's that the ecosystem's timeline is the one that actually matters, and it's always longer than the core team's.